Father Rogoberto Betancurt (left) of Christ is King Catholic Church in Bossier City blesses the home of Olga Trejo in La Caņada Grande in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (Greg Pearson/The Times)

Days before he succumbed to cancer, Celedonio Trejo announced his dying wishes.

The Mexico native asked to be buried in Bossier City, where he lived with his family. He wanted his children to be raised and educated in the United States.

Celedonio's requests were the final chapter of a lifelong dream to provide for his family and give opportunities to his children. The rural village in Mexico where he was born could not offer him those things. What it did give him was an identity he brought with him when he came to the United States as a poor immigrant 30 years ago.

Celedonio and his brothers, who started Trejo's Mexican Restaurant chain in 1984, became the trailblazers and the success stories for a Mexican village named La Caņada Grande, which has more than 25 households in Shreveport-Bossier City who maintain strong ties to their roots.

The Trejo family's story is an old one for the United States, a country built upon immigrants who came in search of a better life. But northwest Louisiana will increasingly see the growth and flux of the Hispanic population that is now the nation's largest minority group. The increasing presence of Hispanic culture will continue to diversify a community accustomed to defining racial lines as black and white.

The Trejos' identity straddles a border. It puts a face on immigrant families from Mexico that represent two thirds of the country's 40 million Hispanics, many who feel their life is in one place but their heart is somewhere else.

Chasing dreams

It began with a dream about shoes.

"My worst nightmare when I was 16 was that I dreamed that I was married and my wife asked me for shoes, and there was no money for shoes," said Celedonio a year before he died. "If there's no money, there's no future. You want to go and find work."

Celedonio did not want to leave Mexico: He had to. He came to Shreveport-Bossier through a contact in 1976 to work as a horse groomer at the Louisiana Downs racetrack with the intention of ending up in Chicago. But the surrounding rural area, which seemed a lot like home, inspired him to start a family and open a restaurant with his brothers. Like many who came after him, he never spiritually left his birthplace.

"Cele was the first one to come here, and the first one to leave," said Celedonio's younger brother, Francisco, the day Cele died at 50 in his Bossier City home in March.

Among the first to follow in Cele's footsteps was Francisco, whom friends and family call Pancho.

Pancho paid smugglers $200 to take him across the border in 1978. He was deported once before gaining residency in 1983, a year after marrying his wife, Laura, and a year before he opened the first Trejo's restaurant with Cele and their brother, Jorge. By the late '80s, Pancho was a naturalized citizen.

The human smugglers -- commonly called coyotes "'-- charge as much as $2,000 these days, he said. They know the ideal times to cross the U.S.-Mexican border. They study security schedules and even bathroom patterns of patrolmen. They guide illegal immigrants on their way to a new life in a new city.

"Some people say, just go ahead and apply for a visa, but they're not going to give it to you," Pancho said. "They come up with so many obstacles and things that you have to prove, and sometimes it's too much trouble."

Stories about losing lives and getting caught did not prevent La Caņada native Raul from seeking the same opportunities as fellow villagers Pancho and Cele. The 33-year-old has been traveling between the United States and Mexico since 1985. He works in Shreveport as a restaurant cook and a gardener, wishing he had legal documentation but deciding it is too difficult to obtain. He sends monthly remittances to his parents, siblings and wife, Veronica, whom he calls every third day. She is raising their three young children in La Caņada with his earnings.

"It's a necessity to come here because there isn't sufficient work to make money and be able to live in La Caņada," said Raul, who speaks no English. "Those who don't come have a brother or sister who sends money to them."

He plans to visit his family in the fall before crossing back through the Rio Grande by boat near Laredo with the help of coyotes, who last charged him $1,500.

Fernando, Raul's 20-year-old brother, paid a coyote $1,700 to cross the Rio Grande three years ago to work in Bossier City. He said crossing illegally was not easy: He was unable to contact his worried family for more than a week as he waited near the border for the right time to cross.

It was hard to complain at the time, though, when he realized he could make $600 every two weeks in the United States. Fernando's brother, Raul, guessed he made less than a third of that in double the time in Mexico.

Fernando, a drummer in a musical group, has since returned to Mexico. He hopes to obtain papers to perform in the United States, but he is not hurrying to return. "In the United States, it's all about working, working, working," he said. "Here, it's about other things, too, like family. If people here don't know the United States, they want to know it. And if they already know it, they don't really want to go back that badly."

Pancho's daughter, Valerie, remembers seeing her cousin Fernando in Bossier City a few years ago. "It was a little awkward to see him, I guess, because I could tell he felt out of place," she said.

Back to our roots

Pancho often uses his hearty chuckle in Mexico.

"When I dream, I'm always dreaming I'm there running the streets of La Caņada," he said. "I know every single stump in the ground. I've got my umbilical cord over there."

He visits La Caņada Grande at least three times a year. When traveling there with his children, Valerie and Charlie, he reminds them of the low cost of living and the summer weather that stays about 15 degrees cooler at the same time Shreveport hits 100-degree days.

"Everything's better in Mexico, right, Dad?" Valerie likes to say.

La Caņada Grande is 24 hours by car from Shreveport. It lies in a valley a little more than an hour away from the city of San Luis Potosi in central Mexico. The agricultural village of fewer than 1,500 residents is big enough to have secondary schools and stores, but small enough that it cannot be found on a country map.

La Caņada begins as a dirt road that cuts through farmland where Pancho first worked in his early teenage years cultivating squash, peanuts, corn and watermelon. There is no cell phone reception, Internet or mail service. Only in recent years did some homes obtain telephone lines and plumbing.

Villagers wake before dawn in preparation for their work in the fields. Cattle saunter through the streets. By mid-morning, a chorus of smacking sounds emerges from small, one-story homes as women prepare tortillas from scratch. Hammer-on-metal clanking sounds drift out onto the road from a local blacksmith's shop. Vendors of gas and food items ride through the village in pickup trucks advertising their offerings with a loudspeaker.

When Pancho arrived for a visit in July, cactus plants were in bloom and fuchsia bougainvilleas burst over residential fences and decorated the streets. Pancho stays in the two-bedroom house where he and Cele were born and where their cousin Armando lives with his children and his wife, Rafaela. A sky blue wall displays pictures of cousins who live in Shreveport. One image shows an elementary-school version of Pancho's 20-year-old son, Charlie, his arm propped up on a stack of books next to an American flag.

Rafaela prepared picadillo, Spanish rice and tortillas for the afternoon arrival of Pancho, his children and good friend the Rev. Rigoberto Betancurt of Christ the King Catholic Church in Bossier City, who would participate in La Caņada's spiritual life. Flies buzzed by the food and the guests as they ate in the kitchen behind the family's small grocery store. A wood-burning stove warmed fresh tortillas. Villagers sat in chairs against the kitchen's mint-green walls, surrounding Pancho as he talked family, food and politics.

Waiting games

Some houses in La Caņada Grande stand empty.

Many are half-finished concrete structures, waiting for their owners in Shreveport and Bossier City to return and finish building them.

Cele and his wife, Olga, built a new abode in the village four years ago. Their three-bedroom, two-bathroom home is equipped with appliances they lugged from Shreveport, including air conditioners, televisions, stereos, a telephone and one of the village's few washers and driers.

Cele met Olga at a dance during one of his trips to La Caņada. He asked her to dance, and they stayed in each others' arms all night. The next day he asked her to marry him, and three months later, they married with the understanding that she would move to Bossier City with him.

Seven years later, Olga approached his casket at Christ the King Catholic Church for her final goodbye. She had waited for guests to pay their last respects after the mass, which lasted almost two hours. Many crossed themselves before his body or reached out to touch his hand. Olga stood motionless before the coffin. Moments later, she lurched away and fell into the arms of a relative.

Olga and her young children, Paco and Selena, recently made their summer journey to La Caņada for the first time without Cele. "The kids want to go back to the United States already," said a tanner, smiling version of Olga on her large porch in La Caņada. "Paco wants a hamburger and pickles."

Unable to drive or speak English, Olga will continue to live in the United States for her children. "Here, there's no money," she said. "Colleges are really far away, and parents want to keep their children here. If they go to school all day, they can't help the family work, so a lot of people just end school early."

She thought of 11-year-old villager Panchito, Armando's son, who recently finished his education after the sixth grade so he could work in his family's grocery store.

"Panchito is very smart," Pancho said later. "He has a picture memory. But he's finished with school already. He said he went through sixth grade, and that's all he needs."

Olga plans to spend the rest of her life with her children in the United States, and will keep bringing them to La Caņada to maintain their Spanish and know their family. But even helping with homework will be a difficult task until she masters English.

"I'm going to have to start doing everything that he did, just the little things that he would take care of," she said. "Cele was always the one who would go to the grocery store with me or the doctor's office. Now I will have to learn everything. He took care of life."

Many village families long for the return of the head of their household.

Veronica worries each time Raul crosses the Rio Grande. "She gets scared," Raul said. "She's gotten used to it, but she suffers a lot because she wishes I was with her."

Five-year-old Lorena has not seen her dad for a year and a half. When asked where Raul is, she raises her wide eyes skyward in thought and then smiles, revealing two missing baby teeth. "He's in some other place right now."

Twenty-year-old Maria Victoria awaits her boyfriend, Alejandro, while she raises their 3-year-old son, Ivan Francisco, whom she calls Chopo. Three months into her pregnancy, Alejandro left for Shreveport to find work. They now talk on the phone when they can. He starts work at a restaurant in the morning and has an hour off in the afternoon before his shift at the casinos that lasts until midnight. He sends her between $130 and $270 dollars every two weeks. Vicki moved from her neighboring village to join Alejandro's family, and the two hope to marry one day. But timing is difficult "" Alejandro met his son for the first time last December, and Vicki is not sure when he will return next.

She sat at home on a July evening and watched a video of a restaurant where her 19-year-old boyfriend works. Alejandro darted into view momentarily. He ate several bites of something and left just as quickly without glancing at the video screen. Meanwhile, Chopo drew circles with a green crayon on the concrete floor of their home before doing the same to a wooden chair.

"I heard that Alejandro is eating a lot and getting fat," she said with a smile. "I don't like that. That's not good."

Vicki does not want to join him because she would be illegal and knows no English. "I don't want to go because I'm scared of crossing through the water. And besides: I like my life here."

One family, two identities

Pancho's children have seen family members trek back and forth between La Caņada Grande and Shreveport for as long as they can remember. Though Valerie and Charlie were born and raised in Shreveport, car trips to Mexico and videotapes depicting village life have been a central part of their upbringing.

"Going down there, it brings you back down to earth," said 20-year-old Charlie, who plans to attend Centenary College to study piano.

On their most recent trip to La Caņada in July, Pancho brought Cele's news obituary as well as almost two dozen collared Trejo's Mexican Restaurant shirts that he would give to villagers. Two young cousins hitched a ride back home to McAllen, Texas, after a week at the Trejos' home on Cross Lake.

Flights arrive at San Luis Potosi, but Pancho takes his car so he can visit relatives. After a day of driving, his first stop was a McAllen hospital where his cousin Juana, a Shreveporter from La Caņada, had been hospitalized while visiting family. He would update village family members, who had heard she was sick.

Not five minutes after Charlie drove the family across the border into Reynosa, a brown and white horse trotted on a sidewalk near the Rio Grande with no owner in sight. A beggar in a wheelchair sat in the center of a busy street and held out his hat for money as cars swerved to avoid him. Tires lay in the middle of the road. A downtown club blared Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." Walls still advertised the name of presidential candidate Felipe Calderon following the recent election.

Valerie, the driver out of Reynosa the next day, merged the car onto a highway heading toward the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range that would take them into central Mexico. Flipping between Spanish and English, she defended her driving style against her dad, a watchful backseat driver.

"If it's the only thing you learned in college, you learned to contradict me real good," Pancho told his 22-year-old daughter as they whizzed past taqueria stands and dilapidated, tilting shacks. He himself never went past the sixth grade.

"I've always looked at La Caņada Grande as a way to bring me back to where I can see with thankful eyes," said Valerie, an aspiring optometrist who graduated from Louisiana College in May. "These people are very welcoming people and they will give you the clothes off their back. They don't act poor. They're cheerful. Although they didn't finish the fourth or fifth grade, they want to support their family and work hard in order to do that."

In La Caņada, locals call her Valeria. She continues to meet new relatives who tell Pancho how pretty she is. When Valerie arrived in July, she saw a cousin wearing her old Sun City Elementary School shirt. Another cousin played with a toy based on a character by Shreveport illustrator William Joyce. Later, she saw Armando using an outdoor grill that used to sit outside her Shreveport home.

She said she also sees scenes of La Caņada in her own backyard in Caddo Parish. In keeping with village customs, the family skinned a pig for Thanksgiving. The carcass hung from her aunt's Bossier City carport.

When she was little, Valerie was inseparable from her La Caņada cousin Marta. But they drifted apart when Marta started having to do chores. She then married at 19. By college, Valerie's visits to La Caņada became less frequent. When she was there, her father would beg her to stay just a day or two longer.

A spiritual bridge

A bittersweet melody filled a Bossier City church.

The performing mariachi band's grave bass line and yearning trumpets raced up and down together before a full sanctuary at Christ the King Catholic Church in Bossier City, where the Rev. Rigoberto Betancurt prepared to lead Celedonio's funeral Mass.

Young Mexican men, many who work in Shreveport and Bossier City as busboys and gardeners, stood shoulder to shoulder in the pews. Some still had on their hairnets from work and wore black shirts with the Trejo's Mexican Restaurant logo in honor of Celedonio.

Valerie dropped a class at Louisiana College to be with her family. "I rarely see my dad get emotional," she said. "Olga and my dad seemed to be carrying a lot of the strength for the family."

But months later, Pancho could not hold his tears back before a community that knew his roots. Pancho and Betancurt had organized a memorial Mass for Cele at San Isidro, a half-finished church in La Caņada Grande the Trejo brothers were helping to build.

"Thank you so much, everyone, for being here at this Mass dedicated to Celedonio," said Pancho, who abruptly put his hand to his heart. "Forgive me for being emotional. I still feel his loss every day. It still hurts."

La Caņada needed Pancho's prayers too. The rains were late and the fields were still young. Rivers and wells were bone dry. During tough times like these, families are thankful for relatives who live elsewhere and can send money home. "They're having it rough this year," Pancho said. "This is one of the worst years I've seen."

Before the service, people made their way to the top of a steep hill where the church is located, their heads appearing first on the horizon. Youths donned jeans and T-shirts, and elderly women framed their sun-weathered faces in black mantillas. Men still had earth under their fingernails and behind their ears from the fields. They removed their bone-white cowboy hats in the church, dedicated to the patron saint of farmers, peasants and rural communities. The setting sun poured onto a white altar tablecloth and a cross breeze ruffled its edges.

"The connection between the people of La Caņada Grande and Shreveport-Bossier is a spiritual bridge that we have to continue to maintain," said Betancurt, a Colombia native who heard 100 confessions, celebrated three Masses and led four evening rosaries during his five-day visit to the village.

Olga and her sisters had spent the day making tamales and atole or porridge for the congregation, and arranged the food off the back of a pickup truck.

Ignacia Trejo, Pancho's distant elder relative who has lived in La Caņada all her life, leaned against the truck and held a chubby tamale in her thin hand.

"I remember when the Trejo family was poor, just like the rest of us," she said.

Her children in the United States offered to pay for an apartment if she wanted to relocate but she declined.

"I would never move because I can do the things in life that I enjoy here," she said. "I like to wake up early in the morning, make tortillas and take a walk through the village. I can't do those things over there."

Resting places

Pancho buried Cele in the soil of a country that opened doors for their family.

"We're always thinking about life," said a bewildered Pancho the day before his brother died. "We're not used to thinking about death.

"For a long time we thought we were going to be buried in La Caņada, but now Cele is already in Bossier City. So we're going to be buried there, too."

Pancho told Valerie he had plots of land picked out in Bossier City for his family. She protested, saying he had not bought enough for all of them. "I've got them for my generation," he said. "And you need to get them for your generation."

La Caņada Grande's cemetery is a 40-minute walk from the village and is located next to a peanut farm. The Trejo name marks many graves there. It is where Pancho's aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and parents were buried. A mound of dirt rose where their bodies were laid to rest.

Gazing at the tombstones of parents Longino and Santana in July, Pancho said he would join them in spirit. "We're just going to have to build a tunnel and visit each other that way."

When their family trip to La Caņada ended in July, Pancho put his children on a plane in San Luis Potosi and lingered for a few days longer. He would take the two-day drive back up to his home in Shreveport with Olga after the weekend, leaving with new memories and a full heart.